Some people think that one should never ask God “Why?” about anything. Others seem to be very interested in asking God “Why?” about all kinds of things. Asking God “Why?” is not necessarily doubting His goodness or His love. It depends on why you are asking “Why?” and on what you are asking. Sometimes, asking …
Continue reading Asking God “Why?” and Declaring His Goodness
This article is probably not what you might expect from the title. There is a very real sense in which all Christians understand all other Christians. Most truly and most importantly, we live the same life, which is Christ. We were baptized with one baptism into one body. We are indwelt by one Holy Spirit, …
Continue reading One Body, Many Members or Together and Alone
One of the beautiful truths about the Christian life, is that God always gives us His absolute best – which, of course, points us to His Son, because it is for us in His Son that He gives us His absolute best, which is Jesus Christ Himself, in Jesus the Son. All things He makes, in our lives, to be very good. Not a single hair of our heads will perish. That is, nothing will be lost. Nothing will turn out to the worse. Nothing will be less than the absolute best and perfect. The statement that not a hair of our heads will perish was made in the context of being persecuted, hated, and killed, and it holds for all of life. “What, then, shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son for us, but freely gave Him over for us all, how will He not, with Him, graciously give us all things?” writes St. Paul, and in another place, “For all things are yours, whether Paul, or Cephas, or Apollos, or the world, or the present, or the future, or life or death – all are yours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's.” Everything was made for us. Pleasure is made for us. Suffering is made for us. Life is for us. Death is for us. We are the heirs of all things, because we are in the risen and glorified Christ. He died for our transgressions and rose for our justification, and in Him all must be ours. The whole world belongs to us in Him – we may enjoy the stars and the flowers and the sunsets. When pleasures are given to us, we praise and thank God for them. We worship Christ. We see His glory and are turned to Him by the majesty of a mountain, the beauty of the sky, the pleasure of a drink of water, the clarity of a color. We see His love for us in the placement of every blade of grass, in the bark of a tree, in food when we are hungry, in the song of a bird. In the same way, when sufferings are given to us, we praise and thank God for them, and we worship the Son, drawn to Him by our suffering, seeing His glory in the midst of it, knowing His love for us in every pain, grief, and shudder. The truth is, for those who have open eyes, the whole world proclaims the glory of the Lord, and in every experience – whether pleasant, even ecstatically pleasant, or painfully, perhaps searingly so – you can know God more, and know more about Him, too. In both pleasure and pain, you can know God in ways you never knew Him before; you can see truths about Him you never realized before; you can know truths you already knew in such a way, with such knowledge, that it is as if you never knew them before. I have never been able to understand the inability of some to see enjoying enjoyable things and giving thanks for painful things as somehow incompatible; there is a huge difference, because pleasure is pleasant and pain is painful – there's a difference between pleasures and between pains, too – which I have no desire to go into here, and I am certain that I could not describe this to anyone who did not already know, but there's also a similarity, even, perhaps, a sameness: we accept both for God's sake and give thanks to Him. One of the things about suffering is this: because of the idolatry in our hearts, it is very easy for us to become distracted by pleasures and to want the pleasures themselves, more accurately, to mistake our desire for our Creator for desire for created pleasures, instead of worshiping God and desiring and delighting in Him and in the pleasure for His sake – which is not to say that the delight in the pleasure (there is a reason pleasure is the word both for our experience and for that which produces the experience in us) is artificial; in suffering this is impossible, or nearly so, since the nature of suffering is pain, not pleasure, so that one must delight in God without distraction, worshiping Him without any danger of worshiping that for which one gives thanks. In Heaven, we will know God so truly, see Him so well, delight in Him so fully, ever satisfied in Him and ever seeking more of Him, that there will be no danger at all of our hearts mistaking created pleasures for our desire, thus idolizing them and rendering our worship and joy impure. (I say one of the things about suffering, because there is glory in suffering that is particular to that suffering, for the suffering becomes itself glory and is itself drawn up into the glory; the glory or reward that rests over suffering is not artificial, but is in fact related to the suffering itself.) It's true, that all is ours and nothing is against us. I write this partially to clarify. Some people draw a line between the “Theology of the Cross” and the “Theology of Glory,” as if the two could ever be separated. There is no glory without the cross, and there is glory in the cross. This is proclaimed in the Gospels and the entire New Testament, and, indeed, the Old Testament also. The Cross and the Resurrection are inseparable. Some people seem to be obsessed with suffering and death, to the extent that they ignore life and resurrection. Redemption begins on earth. Copyright 2018 Raina Nightingale
No matter what happens to you, however horrendous, you will not suffer even insignificant harm – you will not be harmed or damaged in something as minor and seemingly unimportant as a single hair of your head. This is staggering, and it rules out all possibility of what the world means by courage. The whole value system of the world is built on men trying to be gods unto themselves, to find strength, meaning, purpose, power in themselves; as Christians, all of this is done away with (and we must be willing to accept it; we must not fight it when the world scorns us, we must not try to convince the world that we are not really so weak and pitiful as all that, but we should accept its scorn and disregard with joy, rejoicing that we have been counted worthy to be counted among the scum of the world, the off-scouring of all things, with our Savior, going to Him outside the camp). We recognize how completely weak and helpless we are as creatures and we rely on God's strength and God's care. We are strong when we are weak not because there is some strength that works through the appearance of weakness... What is amazing is not the endurance or the joy of the martyrs. What is amazing is not the willingness of Christians to die for their Lord: what is amazing is that their Lord died for them, sinners. Knowing that God demonstrates His own love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us, it is obvious that we would gladly die for Him. The least we can do is to consider our lives not our own but His – He bought them with His blood. We are only slaves dying for our Master, creatures dying for our Creator, redeemed sinners dying for the Perfect Sacrifice and Savior, pardoned rebels for our King. That we should both live and die for Him is nothing. What means something – what staggers belief – is that the Master died for His slaves, the Creator died for His creatures, the Perfect One for defiled sinners, the King for rebels and traitors. “If we live we live to the Lord and if we die we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or we die we belong to the Lord, for to this end Christ both died and lives again, that He might be the Lord both of the dead and of the living.” “You will be betrayed even by friends and family, and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all men because of Me, and not a hair of your heads will perish.”
To be poor in spirit means to recognize that we are creatures. This may well be a description of repentance, for sin began when Satan told Eve that if she ate of the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil she would be like God and she and Adam ate the fruit. But, it is because we are creatures that we are poor in spirit, that we are beggars who have nothing to bring but need, and this is a most blessed state, for it is God's delight to fill our need – which can be satisfied by nothing less – with Himself, with love, with blessing. His desire is to continuously fill continual need with continual blessing. It is a very blessed thing to be a creature, to be poor in spirit.
The most successful prophet in the Old Testament appears to be Jonah. God told him to go to Nineveh, and tell the people there that God would destroy their city in forty days because of their sin. Hating the Ninevites and fearing that they might repent and God would spare their city, Jonah ran away. ...Regardless, to hear Jesus say, “Well done, you good and faithful servant; enter into the joy of your Master,” will be incomparably worth it all. I do not ask for more.
“We who are free to worship and serve the Lord must never forget those who are not.” At first glance these words seem, at least to me, to be saying that Christians should remember, pray for, and preach the Gospel to those who do not know that God sent His Son to be the sacrifice …
It is like the parable of the talents. He loans us all we have, including our bodies and our minds. Spending your whole life trying to take care of your body and eat healthy because you say to yourself, “I belong to God; I should take care of myself,” is like the servant who buried his talent and then said to his master, “Master, I knew you were a hard man, taking what you did not sow and harvesting what you did not plant. So, for fear of losing it, I buried this, your talent. Here is what belongs to you.” We may just as easily be called upon to lose it all for His sake; and, this is no loss, for it was His to begin with. He has the right to demand it back whenever He pleases, in whatever way He pleases, and in whatever portions He pleases... Do not sin; do not live for yourself; do not live or act or choose for your own pleasure; “You are not your own; you were bought with a price. Therefore, honor God with your body.” All your functions, all your parts, are to be at His disposal. Everything you do should be an act of worship. You should use your body in a way that is worthy of your calling as saints; in a way that is worthy of the Lord Jesus... God Himself lives in us. How dare we unite the very temple of God, the members of the Lord, the Lord Himself, with sin and unholiness? Because we are temples of the Holy Spirit, all sin is sacrilege – sin committed against that which is holy.
There is a lot of talk about assurance of salvation, whether it is possible, how it is to be had, whether it is necessary, on and on and on. I really do not think it is the point. The point is simply this, “It is not I who lives, but Christ who lives in me. The life I now live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me.” It's not about whether or not you or I can lose eternal life... It's about the fact that Jesus Christ is eternal life. It is all about Him. How many times did He say, “I am He?” Let us cease to look at ourselves and instead look to Him. “You have been buried with Him through baptism into death.” Salvation – everything – is about Christ. “He who descended is also He who ascended that He might fill all things.” Salvation means that we die and are raised in Christ. This is the way to conquer fear. Fear of what will happen to me? God loves me and is in control of all things. He is sovereign and He loves me as no other can love. This is eternal comfort, but it is not even about eternal comfort; it is about the fact that He is good, that His love is real, that He is YHWH. (How I wish I could say this without using words like I!) Even though I should not know His love, not know His goodness, even though I should forget all that I have ever known of Him (unless He continually gives me the knowledge of Himself I must forget it, for it is knowledge of eternity, eternal knowledge; it is not the kind of thing a creature can keep; it must be continually received by grace through faith,) even though I should turn my back on Him... still, He is good. He remains unchanged. He is Love. He is YHWH – I AM WHO I AM – I am He.
This is a form of idolatry. The verse from Isaiah says it perfectly: “Who are you that you fear?” In other words, what are you that you dare to fear? What are you that you dare to fix your gaze on anyone but your Savior? There is another passage in Isaiah (I think, there might also be some in Jeremiah) where YHWH, the I AM WHO AM, challenges the false gods, the illusions of the people, or is it that He calls on the people to challenge them, saying, “Do good or evil, that we may fear you!” In order to fear, we must first take our eyes off God, our Almighty One, our Savior and strong Deliverer, the Rock of our Salvation.
Enthralled By Love 